nes | 会話ゲーム

Who needs Top Gun when you can play CAPTAIN SKYHAWK?

This game definitely was a rip-off of Top Gun, but it’s a major improvement. I remember watching Top Gun in the theater with my Granddad. It was awesome. During the film, he leaned over to tell me that I was sitting next to a fighter pilot. I was a bit confused because I was just seven years old and didn’t understand how you could be a fighter while in the cockpit of a plane but by the time the film was over I understood what he meant. He was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and flew some jets, but the F-14 came after his time and he was in the Air Force.

After the movie, we went to a store called Best. They went bankrupt in the 90s, but they were the shit back in the 80s. They had a ton of Nintendo Entertainment System games and I wanted to own them all, but since we had just watched Top Gun, he bought the game with the same name for me. I thought the game was going to be like a VR simulation and just as awesome as the movie was. Then we got home and played it. It sucked. It was boring and it was way too hard. It wasn’t fun then and isn’t fun now.

Captain SkyHawk came late in the game for the NES so they had plenty of time to perfect an 8-bit F-14 game.

I clearly remember playing it on my NES Advantage controller. It had an arcade-style d-pad, turbo A and B buttons, and it could cheat with slow-motion by it pressing the start bottom repeatedly. As long as your game didn’t go into some menu when you pressed the start button you could slow down time. The only problem was it could get mixed up between players one and two or your friend or sibling could switch it on you when you weren’t looking to make you die.

Are you ready for take-off captain? This may look lame now, but before I had a Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, or N64, this was amazing.

I love those memes where they say that you can’t hear a picture, but if you remember this game then you can hear this right?

It’s time to take out some enemy fighters. You could either try to be an ace and shoot down as many as you could, or you could be a coward and play it safe avoiding their missiles.

How many F-14s were capable of going up to space? Captain Skyhawk’s could. I don’t remember what happened if you failed to dock with the space station. It was pretty easy every time.

Since it was over two decades since I played this game I wasn’t sure which weapon system was the most important to upgrade so I went with maxing out the gun first. I don’t think I used but two or three missiles or bombs this time around, but I eventually maxed them all out too.

I hate playing games on my phone with the stupid non-tactile touchscreen, but playing these old games are worth it now with the ability to play offline ad-free, the save state options, and of course the ability to REWIND time!

This scene probably took a month to create in Microsoft Paint and isn’t very impressive today, but it had a real 3-D let’s fly into space feeling back then.

It took me forever to figure out how to drop the supplies down to our allies back then and it did again this go around. It also reminds me of the only time my Grandad ever yelled at me. We were performing at an airshow in a Piper Cub dropping “bombs”. They were balloons full of washable paint we had to drop on targets on the runway. He told me to drop the balloon on three. One, two, three! “Do I drop it right when he says three or a second after three or was there a four?” was what I remember thinking when he turned back angrily and growled, “I’ve been doing this for 22 years! When I say 3!, you DROP the bomb!” (We still got first place, so my one bad bomb drop was OK competing against our civilian pilot competitors.)

Playing this again on my phone with the rewind and save state ability was a lot of fun, but I wish my emulator had a slow-motion option like back in the day. When Captain Skyhawk’s F-14 wings go back, things go fast!

Screenshot_20220423-150841_NostalgiaNES Lite~2.jpg

Alright! We’ve made it to the alien enemy space station with the big eye. Let’s do this!

I did beat this back in the day, but the slow-motion button was on so the game thought I was pressing the start button over and over again, so I never got to see the ending until now.

What is this? Game of Thrones? It’s like they didn’t care at all about good endings to games back in the day. At least Doom II and Super Mario 64 did a good job. Do you remember this game too? Thanks for reading. Now let’s all go watch Top Gun Maverick! May the need for speed be with you!

Revenge of an old-school gamer on Super Mario Bros. 3 – part II

What’s up fellow gamers? I finally did it! I defeated ~~Bowser~~ in Super Mario Bros. 3 from the old-school Nintendo Entertainment System or the Famicom if you had the Japanese version. It just took me 34 years to do it. This is part two of my journey to defeat the evil princess kidnapping dinosaur. You can read the first part here.

I quit after making it to world 4 for part one which I figured was halfway, but things go so hard after that point that it was more like a quarter of the way through even though I was cheating using save states and the rewind time cheat.

I never used the frog suit or the hammer brothers’ power-ups. I think I’ll play this game again just to have the experience of using those powers. This damn fish ate me at least a hundred times. I would rewind time, try again, and again, and again. Sometimes I got so frustrated that I wouldn’t play the game for days.

What a great super-power rewinding time would be. Even if it was just for a 24-hour period. We could check CoinMarketCap, see which shit-coins made the biggest gains, then do the same thing again the next day like we were Biff from Back to the Future. If you could rewind time and change just one event from your past what would it be? For me, it would be not selling all of my cards. I got greedy and thought selling all of my Splinterlands maxed-out Beta cards would be a good idea because DeFi was all the rage last year. If I had just held on to those cards, I wouldn’t have to worry about money today. Everything happens for a reason. I just hope I get another chance to grow my crypto wallet.

Super Mario Bros. 3 has to be the best 8-bit game ever made. I wonder if this had been the first game to come out what kind of games would’ve come after it. If I were the CEO of Nintendo I would’ve never stopped making games for the NES. Of course, it wouldn’t make sense to continue making games when you’re trying to sell Super Nintendos, but making just one game a year would be a great way to say thank you to customers and it would also guarantee that your system never becomes obsolete. It would also be interesting seeing how they could innovate and be creative given the technological limits.

This game was just way too hard. There is no way I would’ve made it to giant world without an endless supply of quarters or a Game Genie when I was a kid, but I sure would’ve enjoyed seeing this back then. Speaking of endless quarters, I remember when I was a kid in a casino in Deadwood, South Dakota back in the 80s, we noticed that they didn’t lock the quarter collection box for the video games. Back then I thought it was just because grown-ups were stupid and didn’t think that we kids would steal quarters, but looking back it makes sense now. They were using the video game machines as virtual babysitters while our parents were losing serious cash on the slot machines and blackjack tables. Even if they did empty out the quarters, we just needed one. We would drop it down, catch it so it didn’t make a sound, then re-drop it so we’d have as many lives as we wanted.

These hammer brothers used to give me grief, but playing through the game this time, I learned that the best thing to do is to approach them right away before they start raining down hammers. It’s like if someone intends to hurt you with a sword or a bat, the best thing to do is to get up close to them. It doesn’t seem like the right thing to do, but they can do less damage if you’re closer.

Another thing I didn’t realize until this run-through is how easy it is to get the star at the end of the level. You don’t have to think about it, run, or time it. Just walk over without stopping and jump up to the box and you will get the star every time. By the time I made it to Bowser, I think I had about 70 lives. This really was a genius way of ending a level. It looks and feels like you broke the game. It’s like an early version of The Matrix as you pass from the colorful world to the inverse digital one.

How many times did this stupid king get changed into some animal? They all still knew and respected him as king so he should have stayed in bird form. If he really cared about his kingdom this would’ve been best. He could’ve served as an eye in the sky warning his people whenever Bowser and his gumbas were approaching.

There were a couple of spots where I felt it was just impossible to continue and I wish I hadn’t wasted my infinite flying ability power. Did any of these spots ever trip you up too?

This evil angry sun even comes after you in the dark? Come on man!

I’m no fan of mazes. They are truly cruel. I quit playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild because I got stuck in the stupid haunted forest maze and couldn’t get out even with YouTube’s help.

I had so much fun playing the third Mario game that I went back to play the original, but it was too easy and there is a maze at the end. I didn’t even bother looking up how to beat it on YouTube or care to beat it because I’ve done it many times before and it’s a lame ending. I never liked the second Mario so I didn’t play that at all. Besides, it’s not even a real Mario game. It’s a completely different game that Nintendo converted into a Mario game at the last minute because they knew that the American audience wasn’t going to like the Japanese version of Mario 2. It was exactly like the first one, just super difficult.

This is it! The final level, Bowser’s castle. Are they just going to let me walk up to it without some hand pulling me away? OK, let’s do this!

Just wonderful! There are Bowser laser-shooting gargoyles!

You can’t just jump on Bowser’s head like one of his kids.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for…

If your enemy is stupid enough to destroy or kill themself, then don’t get in their way.

Later alligator, I mean, Bowser.

Are you kidding me? This is the ending? A lame joke? Not cool Nintendo. Oh wait, you’re going to play some cool music and flashback to all the worlds I defeated along the way?

Thanks for reading about my old-school gaming adventure today. Have any of you beat this game without cheating?

GAMEBOY: A new cartridge game for the original system three decades after launch is coming soon!

At first I thought this was an official Nintendo Gameboy game, but it’s a Kickstarter project that also plans to release a cartridge for the NES. Their goal was only $7,000 and I see it going up by thousands of dollars a day way past their target, so they’ll most likely succeed at producing both cartridges. They say they will not make any ROMs, just cartridges to keep the nostalgia for the classic alive.

All my previous games are sold and distributed mostly in physical cartridge (not ROM) since the main idea is to keep alive the spirit and gameplay of this legendary console.

Dana

Dear Nintendo,

Isn’t it great people still love your systems 31 years after they launched? Why not reward these loyal fans by creating a “Classic” division at Nintendo where you dedicate a fraction of your expenses to producing at least one game a year for every system you’ve ever produced? Yes, even the Virtual Boy. This would keep loyal Nintendo fans super happy and parents buying a system for their kids would feel more comfortable knowing that there will always be new games being produced for that system. I know Nintendo has enough cash to survive hundreds of years, so profit doesn’t matter as much as keeping fans happy and I think Dana and his Kickstarter here have found a great way to do just that. If my idea ever becomes a reality, I will be very excited to play a new N64 title every year. If this had been company SOP since the beginning, we could be enjoying Super Mario 64 X and Mario Kart 64 X by now as well as some cool Zelda 64 hits.

How many Gameboys do you think are still around? Even if only one percent survived the trash bin, that would still mean millions of originals and later versions are still working that could play this game. As a Nintendo fanboy, I’m happy to see that love for the Gameboy is still strong. Remember that old Johnny Cash song, The Gambler, which Kenny Rogers more famously sang…

If you’re gonna play the Gameboy,
You gotta learn to play it right!

As a kid, I always thought he was talking about my favorite portable gaming system not realizing the song was a classic from the 1970s about gambling. I think most people do that. They hear, see, or read what they want to rather than understand the whole thing.

Check out Dana’s Kickstarter here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danapuch/new-cartridge-game-the-shapeshifter-2021/description